My Friend Ivan Lapshin

In 1985, a man recalls the people he lived with, communally, fifty
years prior, just as Stalin's reign of terror was taking hold. Through
the eyes of nine-year old Alexander, we meet his father, two policemen and
the 'landlady' he lived with in a rural town. Two arrivals - that
of an agitprop theater group and a writer distraught over the loss of his
wife - spark a love triangle with Alexander's preeminent memory, "My Friend
Ivan Lapshin."

Laura:
For his third singularly directed film, Aleksei German ("Trial on the Road")
turned to the last novel written by his father, Yuri (adapted by Eduard
Volodarskiy), to create a before and after look at Soviet life. The
film is challenging, German playing with time, film stocks and shooting
styles, his cinema fractured to give the abstract impression of distant
memories. Small details are exaggerated while larger themes are hidden
in the crevices, yet German turns to a linear, more artfully shot style at
the midway point, allowing the viewer to pull the strands together.
As the latter half deals more with Lapshin's hunting of the brutal Solovyev
gang, perhaps the narrator has turned more to written accounts.

The film begins with memories Lapshin's 40th birthday celebration in cramped
quarters. Fascist Italian pilots in Messerschmitts are parodied for
the child's amusement. Babooshka Patrikeyevna (Zinaida Adamovich)
serves food, cleans up and complains about sugar consumption. German
employs artless zooms into and out of the action (in black and white - present
day is represented in color). Vasili Okoshkin (Aleksei Zharkov, "Prisoner
of the Mountains") speaks of leaving with Ivan Lapshin (Andrei Boltnev)
for the gold fields. Later, though, Lapshin approaches newcomers in
the town square and frightens away a horse-driven cart trafficking in stolen
firewood. 'This is where it all began' we're told and two things begin
- Lapshin falls for actress Natasha Adasova (Nina Ruslanova), who asks him
to introduce her to a whore so that she may research her character.
He also begins to pick up the trail of Solovyev. Later events include
the arrival of Lapshin's journalist pal Khanin (Soviet comedian Andrey Mironov),
suicidal over the loss of his wife (although his attempt is vaguely comical),
who becomes the sixth to live in Lapshin's digs and the object of Natasha's
unreturned affections. Lapshin's advances are spurned ('It would have been
so nice'), the play is roundly panned (Adasova falls on stage) and Lapshin
recovers from a bullet wound, yet, we are told, was never treated for the
shell shock he endured.

The tracking of Solovyey is dynamically photographed with sharper images
by cinematographer Valeri Fedosov and we see a colder version of the Lapshin
we've come to know. German acknowledges the end of an idealistic era
with the arrival of the train that will take Lapshin for training, its engine
adorned with a huge portrait of Stalin as bands play in the background.

"My Friend Ivan Lapshin" takes a bit of work to follow, especially in its
early goings, and German's work may be more specifically targeted to Soviet,
rather than global, audiences (the movie is largely considered one of the,
if not the greatest, of Russian films). I know I've seen Soviet films
which had a greater impact on me overall, but once what German's trying
to do sinks in, Lapshin becomes a potent symbol of the Stalinist era. The
film ends back with the (unseen) narrator, a color view of the town showing
something much changed, bigger but perhaps not better.